Wild Foods for Sustainable Food Security and Nutrition
With global population set to reach almost 10 billion by 2050, there is urgent need to re-evaluate how we produce quality food if we are to meet goals to reduce all forms of malnutrition and environmental and climate commitments. Whilst dominant paradigms around agriculture and environmental conservation have tended to view food production and sustainability goals as insurmountable and mutually exclusive, recent scholarship and policy discussion has highlighted the opportunities that exist in deriving integrated agenda for food security, nutrition, agriculture, and environmental conservation. Within this, retaining and promoting landscape diversity, particularly the maintenance of forests and trees within agricultural landscapes, has become a particular point of interest. This thesis focuses on a particular aspect of such debates, offering novel empirical insights on the potential contributions of “wild foods”, sourced from across diverse landscapes, to safe, sustainable, and nutritious diets in Indigenous Peoples communities in northeast India. Bringing together primary and secondary quantitative data, this thesis demonstrates at multiple scales the ways in which wild foods can be an important addition to diets otherwise oriented around staple grains. At the macro-scale, secondary analyses based on national-level demographic data and remotely sensed data on forest cover indicate the contributions of proximate forest to dietary diversity and improved anthropometric status in infants and young children, particularly in areas of thick forest cover. At the micro-level, analysis of primary data from Meghalaya, northeast India, demonstrates the ways that wild foods contribute to adult dietary diversity and self-reported health. This work demonstrates the huge variety of wild foods consumed across the seasonal calendar and sourced from a diversity of land use categories. Building on these findings, in-depth qualitative work offers insight into the drivers of wild food consumption and use and influencing harvesting behaviours. Whilst motivation to consume wild foods remains strong in the areas under study (due to reasons of taste, health, and culture), factors such as time and labour serve as critical constraints on consumption. Finally, with this PhD completed during and in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the topic of wildmeat is given its own chapter, with consumption practices, drivers of use, and perceptions of health and risk characterised. Building evidence on the ways in which wild foods, sourced from across the landscape mosaic, can contribute to diets whilst ensuring the sustainable management of food biodiversity has significant potential to contribute to sustainable food systems debates, and the achievement of global commitments around food and environment.
Conservation, Food security, Geography, India, Indigenous Peoples, Malnutrition, Political Ecology, Sustainability
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